Rambles on the Riviera

by M. F. Mansfield

As one approaches closer he notes the capricious scallops of the shore-line of this bizarre but beautiful jutting point, and congratulates himself that he did not make his way overland.

A little village is in the extreme south, its whitewashed houses shepherded by a little church and the ruins of an old fortress-château. The town is as nothing, but the view is most soothing and tranquil in its impressive beauty and quiet charm. Nothing is violent or exaggerated, but the components of many ideal pictures are to be had for the turning of the head. Giens is another “artist’s sketching-ground” which has been wofully neglected.

The eastern shore is less savage and there are some attempts at agriculture, but on the whole Giens and its peninsula are but a distant echo of anything seen elsewhere. The quadrilateral walls of the old château, a semaphore, and a coast-guard station form, collectively, a beacon by sea and by land, and, as one makes his way to the mainland along the narrow causeway, he is reminded of that sandy ligature which binds Mont St. Michel with Pontorson, on the boundary of Brittany and Normandy.

Hyères is no longer fashionable. One would not think this to read the alluring advertisements of its palatial hotels, which, if not so grand and palatial as those at Monte Carlo, are, at least, far more splendid than those “board-walk “ abominations of the United States, or the deadly brick Georgian façades which adorn many of the sea-fronts of the south coast of England. The fact is, that society, or what passes for it, flutters around the gaming-tables of Monte Carlo, though for motives of economy or respectability they may sojourn at Nice, Menton, or Cap Martin.

For this reason Hyères is all the more delightful. It is the most southerly of all the Riviera resorts, and, while it is still a place of villas and hotels, there is a restfulness about it all that many a resort with more lurid attractions entirely lacks.

Built cosily on the southern slope of a hill, it is effectually sheltered from the dread mistral, which, when it blows here, seems to come to sea-level at some distance from the shore. The effect is curious and may have been remarked before. The sea inshore will be of that rippling blue that one associates with the Mediterranean of the poets and painters, while perhaps a league distant it will roll up into those choppy whitecaps which only the Mediterranean possesses in all their disagreeableness. Truly the wind-broken surface of the Mediterranean in, or near, the Golfe de Lyon is something to be dreaded, whether one is aboard a liner bound for the Far East or on one of those abominable little boats which make the passage to Corsica or Sardinia.

Hyères in one of its moods is almost tropical in its softness with its famous avenue of palms which wave in the gentle breezes which spring up mysteriously from nowhere and last for about an hour at midday. Its avenues and promenades are delightful, and there is never a suggestion of the snows which occasionally fall upon most of the Riviera resorts at least once during a winter. The only snow one is likely to see at Hyères is the white-capped Alps in the dim northeastern distance, and that will be so far away that it will look like a soft fleecy cloud.

Hyères is beautiful from any point of view, even when one enters it by railway from Marseilles, and even more so—indescribably more so, the writer thinks—when approaching by the highroad, from Toulon or Solliès-Pont, awheel or “en auto.”

Of all the historical memories of Hyères none is the equal of that connected with St. Louis. None will be able to read without emotion the memoirs of Joinville, giving the details of the return of Louis IX. and his wife, Marguerite de Provence, from the Crusades. The account of their arrival “au port d’Yeres devant le chastel” is most thrilling. One readily enough locates the site to-day, though the outlines of the old city walls and the château have sadly suffered from the stress of time.

This was a great occasion for Hyères; the greatest it has ever known, perhaps. “They saluted the returning sovereign with loud acclamations, and the standard of France floated from the donjon of the castle as witness to the fidelity of the inhabitants for the sovereign.”